There is something about a crowd that leads to a sense of anonymity or even depersonalization: You lose your sense of individuality and let the mob carry you away. If you look at how similarly we dress and fix our hair, you'd have to say we are almost all conformists. In the article "Opinions and Social Pressure." social psychologist Solomon E. Asch conducted groundbreaking studies on independence and conformity under group pressure which deals with the role of social pressure, in contrast to independent, individual thought and action, influencing not only attitudes and beliefs, but perceptions. This technique allowed an examination of the social construction of reality, and gave rise to decades of research on conformity. (336-342)
Asch states that when people don't trust their own judgments, they look to others for evidence of how to choose correctly. This self-doubt may occur when a situation is ambiguous, as it was in a classic series of experiments. …
